Golden Rule to open downtown cafe, shop

SHERIDAN — A new type of healthy, interactive café will call Main Street home beginning this spring.

Melissa Smith, who owns Golden Rule Grocers with her husband, Jim, said they will open Studio Café on the corner of Grinnell and Main streets and hope it’ll be ready to open at the end of April.

Smith said the café will be open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., giving Main Street an evening coffee shop.

The only other late-night coffee shop in town is Andi’s Coffee House, located on Broadway Street.

The café will have three sections: the front of the café will be a restaurant, coffee shop, smoothie and juice bar, serving pastries from Goldie’s Bakery and food from Golden Rule; the middle section will be a store featuring local products; and the back of the store is what Smith calls the “learning shop.”

The learning shop will be a lounge setting featuring different classes taught by locals. Smith said she already has businesses offering to teach classes that range from cooking and arts to photography and home maintenance.

“See, what it does is it advertises that business,” Smith said. “So we want that business to be advertised as well as it builds community. We really want to be a community hub.”

Smith also said the café will not only have a variety of board games, but will also have easels and paint supplies so patrons can pay a small fee to paint.

Smith said they’re renting the property, which previously housed Twin M Design Co., so she’s happy there’s not a lot of construction that needs to go into converting the space. She said that even if the café moves, it will stay on Main Street.

Sheridan Soap Company owner Sean Anderson said the café will also be the soap company’s home for operations. He said they were just about to take the company on a road tour but couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

“So we were all gearing up for that, and then all of a sudden this location came up, which is such a key, pivotal, it’s such a wonderful location,” Anderson said. “It’ll be a really fun, unique store and it’ll be just a great venue for Sheridan Soap Company to kind of showcase some of their stuff.”

Anderson said the company will offer classes on making soap and body cream. He said he’s excited for the hyper-local focus of the store, from serving local food, to selling products from local businesses and artisans and providing classes taught by locals.

“It’s just gonna have all those little nuts and bolts that make it just a fun lively place,” Anderson said. “There’s always going to be something going on. And I think that’ll be one of the major attractions, that you come in and there’s just something going on.”

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Chelsea Coli joined The Sheridan Press in October 2016 as the county government, business and outdoors reporter. Coli has a master’s in journalism from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before moving to Wyoming, Coli taught English through the LADO International Institute and worked as an intern and copywriter for Ruby Studio in Colombo, Sri Lanka.